A POE
OVERVIEW

The trick, in fully appreciating Poe, is to see how his
aesthetic ideas (his theory of art), metaphysical theory, personal obsessions,
and desire to cater to one very popular literary genre of the era (gothic
sensation fiction, which emphasizes the sensations of a victim in some
harrowing situation) all fold together to create the characteristic Poe tale or
typical features of many of his tales.

1) The
Ideal is desired. Music (non-representational art [mimesis is the
technical literary term for art that reflects “reality”—e.g., a description of
a Volvo reflects a Volvo out in the parking lot]) provides the best avenue,
because although it may conjure up emotions or images, is the most abstract of
art forms: it means itself, it doesn’t point, as were, to something beyond
itself0. Problem: how do you create a narrative that doesn't refer
to/represent something beyond its own confines (and thus bog us down in
thoughts of the mundane world)? How do you avoid the bad art that Poe
speaks of in "The Veil of the Soul": "The mere imitation,
however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of
'Artist.' ... We can, at any time, double the true beauty of an actual
landscape by half closing our eyes as we look at it. The naked Senses
sometimes see too little--but then always they see too much." Here, keep
in mind that Poe is implicitly rejecting a Lockean model of mind, in which we
passively absorb outside stimuli.

2) What is not of the Ideal realm (all
materiality) imprisons us. For Poe (unlike Emerson and Thoreau, both
Transcendentalists), the Ideal is not immanent in Nature.
Burial/enclosure imagery often symbolizes the aspiring soul entrapped in
materiality/nature (in the broadest sense, not trees and bears).

3) #2 links psychologically, quite likely, to Poe's sense of being suffocated
by his desperate, impoverished lifestyle (he was one of the first U.S. writers
to make a living--barely, if that--by pen alone; this often entailed endless
hours being the editor of various journals) and, probably, to his
mother/cousin-wife dying. Also, he held in his faux-father, Allen, in
contempt for his philistine crassness.

Psychologists who have studied the mourning process
claim that images of engulfment typically represent a child-mourner's
frustrated desire to regain attachment/union with the dead mother (note how
images of engulfment/abyss/eternity, etc., in "Manuscript" simultaneously
strike panic/fear and desire in the narrator--fear of death but also longing
for pre-natal "oneness" with the maternal, as it were). Those
who provide psychoanalytical interpretations of Poe also claim that images of
decay, inanimate substances that seem to be animate, resurrections from the
grave, etc., symbolize the child's inability to understand rationally that the
dead mother is really gone.

The problem with such interpretive approaches or with
interpretations that read the tales as projections of inward psychological
conflict--e.g. Eye/Old Man ( = symbolic projection of Superego, which itself is
an introjection of exterior authority) must be killed violently and with manic
glee by Son (Id impulsivity, resenting Superego) because Son enters some
tabooed space (of maternity/femininity, via eye-cat-wife link in "Black
Cat")--is that they are difficult to relate to. If we accept that
Poe's tales are dream-like as they divulge the strange, jumbled contents of the
unconscious, we must either be willing to fuse together stories and see how
images get associated (eye-cat-wife) OR be sensitive to the potentially
disturbing contents of our own minds: the point of the "Cask of
M" is to take pleasure in Montresor's sadistic glee as he walls up
F.! The point of "A Tell-Tale Heart" is the Oedipal pleasure of
slaying the Father who forbids tabooed delights, etc.

We should also consider the trauma of young Poe seeing his (by all accounts,
quite beautiful) mother die and revive on the stage as she played Shakespearean
heroines. Or the trauma of seeing his young (3-D, as it were) wife die in one
room, while he writes (in 2 D) in another: writing/texts and bodies in Poe get
interchanged, transposed, and converted all the time. Of the reason Poe loved
cryptograms is that “buried” meaning is encrypted within the surface gibberish
of the code. He was, incidentally, a master of constructing cryptograms, and
such is a theme of some of his stories.

Two other examples of the latter: turn to the pages with
strange markings in "Narrative of AGP": the narrator explores these
massive, cavernous ravines; but from a bird's eye perspective, they look like
arcane, indecipherable writing. If you read "Pit and Pendulum"
the odd prison room of the prisoner has peculiar hieroglyphic writing on its
walls. In Poe, paranoia/desire always hovers around secretive writing,
buried secrets, buried vaults, crypts, cryptographic puns. That's why I
emphasized (I'm sure too often!) the box-within-a-box-within-a-box/story-within-a-story-within-a-story
structure of "Oval Portrait."

Keep in mind that this is an era in which for various
reasons, “American Romantic” writers are especially sensitive to what it means
to make meaningful “marks”: 1) fascination with Egyptian hieroglyphs decoded in
the Rosetta Stone, 2) a recognition that sublime sentiments cannot quite be
captured in words, 3) anxiety (in an entrepreneurial culture, in which it is
difficult to make writing pay) about indulging the creative habit. 4) a desire
to make “marks” a tease to sublime thought (if “Volvo” transparently and
directly pointed to a Volvo-concept in your mind or a Volvo in the parking lot,
the word “Volvo” would unproblematically represent what it represents; by
creating an aura of blockage around “Volvo,” paradoxically, in terms of
representation, we are conducted to the Ideal (#1 above). The French loved Poe’s
poetry, in part, because he seemed to be pronouncing a theory of art sake for
art’s sake: art does “do” or “represent” or “mean” anything (sometimes we call
this theory “aestheticism”; Oscar Wilde, loosely, had the same theory towards
the end of the nineteenth-century in Britain).

For Poe, exploring Woman/Maternity/the Grave/Secretive,
revelatory Knowledge/Interiority is obsessionally necessary and ultimately
futile or open-ended. When you read the stories "Manuscript Found in a
Bottle" and "The Purloined Letter" ponder all of this!

4) How do you get to work through the psychological traumas/problems of #3 and
express the metaphysical notion of #2? You come up with another
metaphysical idea, which Poe talks about in his long hoaxy-scientific treatise Eureka--the
universe is in the process of de-materializing, dissolving into finer and finer
particles, eventually so fine as to be non-corporeal. Images of
death/decay/entering gloomy gothic spaces in Poe simultaneously and
paradoxically represent a desired movement towards the Ideal (dissolution of
materiality/feminine--maternal engulfing space) and the horror of losing loved
ones/being entrapped. The conflict between desire (for what is beyond
materiality)/fear (about material decay) leads to the typical hysterical tone
of many of his narrators. The ending of Poe stories typically speed up,
with an at once manic and reluctant rush to the conclusion, in which meaning will
at once be fulfilled and denied. Note this, particularly, in “Usher.”

5) Poe also uses gothic imagery because (as a very profession editor) he was
immersed in the magazine culture of his day, and well-knew how to please
popular taste. Today, we just read the classics—Melville, Hawthorne, etc.; but
in fact there were all sorts of popular authors in this period writing
historical-religious “Sword and Sandal” romances about gladiators and swooning
princesses, crime stories, and adventure stories. (A few years ago, a scholar
made his scholarly name by writing a book called “Beneath the American
Renaissance,” which recaptures all these now-unread but then popular works.)

6) You also can approach the Ideal by turning your attention away from the
mundane world, by retreating inward: thus all the hypersensitive, introspective
artist types in Poe's fiction (of course, such may also lead to dementia).
Again, make the comparison and why I’ve made the Emerson eyeball passage
so crucial: for Emerson transcendental euphoria occurs by taking a sojourn in
Nature although Nature is transcended, but for Poe, ultimately Nature (trees,
bears, houses, your body, whatever) must be travelled through as a prison to be
escaped from.

7) What sort of imagery, etc., will best serve non-moral or non-content,
non-representational art (#1), provide the desired intensity of
sensation/consciousness, and serve Poe's psychological and metaphysical
agenda? How keep us interested or in a heightened state of
consciousness/suspense, without producing meaning (which is not to say that
there aren't themes in Poe's stories--I'm emphasizing an aspect of/one way of
interpreting Poe's stories)?

--images of enclosure or rooms sealed from the wider (mundane) world

--rather than relationships between psychologically distinct characters (which
would lead to ethical conflict, etc.), lots of doubles (i.e., aspects of the
protagonist)

--narratives with an enigma/puzzle structure (either we don't get the answer or
the interest is in the act of solving the puzzle, not the solution itself)

--many puns and cryptograms (both carry "buried" messages, but
significance is in the structure of the pun, not meaning per se)

--self-reflexive references to the process of reading/writing/art (e.g.,
"The Oval Portrait" is a story about a story about an artist whose
wife decays/fades so that his art will partake of the Ideal)

--allusions to all sorts of esoteric knowledge (so you don't really know what
is being referred to)

--general feeling of paranoia (the fearful anticipation of some overwhelming
horror/revelation is more significant than the actual horror or revelation)

8) Keep in mind that a character in a Poe story may be a projection of the
narrator's (or Poe's) obsessions/mentality or a projection of another
character's obsessions/mentality (burying his sister = Usher's attempt to
repress his desire for her?)

--"decoding" valid if makes sense of repeated patterns: takes
rereading of many tales or intuition of your own unconscious processes

--“decoding” fun but speculative, and you can’t feel the conflict
(self-tormenting theme if we see Montresor/Fortunato as two sides of Poe)

--Tell-Tale: orifice=sexual desire (Poe sneaking into Virginia’s room) +
father-figure/surveillance that you want to murder because checks desire. The
eye collapses together (this is what happens in dreams) both the tabooed object
and punishment for peeping on/desiring the tabooed object.

GROUPING OF TALES: all of Poe's stories are characteristically Poe-like,
sharing features reviewed above. For convenience, though, they may be
grouped as follows (not all read for this class):